Big Brother looms over House GOP’s ‘Orwellian’ cybersecurity bill

Imagine a country where every e-mail, every electronic banking transfer, every blogger’s political rant can be handed to the FBI and National Security Agency. There is no need for a warrant from a judge. There is no legal protection for personal privacy. It is simply up to your Internet service provider to decide what is suspicious and send it to the government.

Imagine that the Congress approves of this radical challenge to civil liberty by saying the new law is the best way to prevent terrorists from creating chaos in the financial system, plotting violence and hacking into big companies in a conspiracy to destroy the nation with a “Digital Pearl Harbor.”

Well, there is no need for a modern-day George Orwell to imagine the scary story in which Big Brother, an authoritarian government, colludes with multinational corporations to trample civil liberty.

This alarming story is close to becoming reality. With the best of intentions, Congress and the White House are trying to prevent terrorists from using the Internet to destroy the nation. But they are dangerously close to opening the door to erosion of privacy rights in America.